This invention is directed to an improved process for the preparation of pet food. More specifically, the invention includes a process which allows the use of normally unutilized fowl, fish, and animal species as the basis of pet food products.
The most common pets are dogs and cats. Both of these animal species are descendants of carniverous ancestors. In view of this, the metabolic needs are based on eating flesh, that is animal products and not products of vegetable origin.
While it may be very convenient to feed one's pet table scraps, this, in effect, is metabolically not good for the pet. Because humans are omnivorous, the human digestive system is capable of handling food of both animal and vegetable origin. Table scraps of vegetable origin, however, are not the natural ancestral diet of dogs and cats. Because of this, common pets not only naturally crave, but nutritionally should have, food substances derived from body parts of other animals.
In the past, many pet foods have utilized scraps or economic cuts left over from meat intended for human consumption. Because these scraps or economic cuts are of a high quality, in order for the pet foods to be economically acceptable, the scraps and economic cuts of the meat products must be diluted with large quantities of binder materials. This not only detracts from the product in consideration of the natural "palate" of the pet, but also detracts from the nutritional value of these products for the pet. Further, these binder materials have little fibrous content as do the pets natural ancestral food supply. In view of this, it is very easy for the pet to become temperamental with respect to its food.
Many types of animal species are under utilized because of their poor acceptance as a human food source. Often times, especially with regard to fish products, an undesirable fish species, if netted, hooked, or the like, is simply returned to the oceans in either a dead or weakened form. This has economic reverberations with respect to other more desired species which is being sought because of the time and cost it takes to initially "catch" these undesirable species and then return them to the oceans. The costs associated with catching the undesired species is added on to the cost of the desired species, making the desired species more expensive.
Recently, equipment has become available for deboning meat and fish. Certain animal species which previously were undesirable because of the economics involved in cleaning and deboning the same, can now be harvested. However, during the automatic cleaning or deboning processes, the flesh portions of the animal body is rendered into a paste. During this process some of the animal body cells are disrupted, releasing the proteins located therein. As a result of this the paste includes certain desired free myofibrillar proteins. The paste also includes proteins originating from smooth muscle, collagenaceous origins, and body organs which are undesirable. These undesirable proteins are present at even further undesirable levels if, in fact, the deboning process is carried out, as for instance, on a fish which still has its head and/or entrails intact. In any event, the paste yielded from the deboning equipment will contain varying amount of soluble or collagenaceous proteins, in addition to the more desirable myofibrillar proteins.
If the paste, as received from the above described deboning process, is utilized directly to form pet food products, during the cooking stage of this procedure the above described undesirable proteins forming a constituent part of that paste tend to leach and run out to form voids in the finished product or form jelly pockets. Both of these result in undesirable end products. While cold water can be utilized to remove these undesirable proteins, it inevitably leads to unaccepted yields rendering the process uneconomical.